A Long, Long, Long, Boring Post

I was just thinking about the role of the speaker in the poems we read in class last week. As I began to speak about one of the Wordsworth poems, it seemed as though the entire class jumped up and replied in chorus, "you're synthesizing the poet and the speaker!" I was a bit taken aback by the display.
I too, know the difference between the poet and the speaker in a poem, but to dogmatically adhere to this or any other model of interpretation limits the number of ways that we can understand a work of art. There are many works of prose that are meant to be interpreted as a direct connection between the writer and the reader; why should poetry necessarily be any different? In the case of the Wordsworth poem, I believe that having this different perspective allows us a little more power to interpret.

Allow me to demonstrate. Whenever we are interpreting language, there must be a level to which we describe as "most true." Newspaper articles and diary entries have very simple relationships with this truth and the reader, because there is no level of truth beyond what they point to directly (in the vast majority of cases). More complex is the epistolary novel where an author has arranged a set of texts that point to the level of truth. This can be made even more complex if these documents where, in the world of the fiction, created by an unreliable narrator. For each of these levels of complexity, we must adjust our level of processing in order to keep track of which levels are "reliable" and which are "unreliable," a distinction which may remain plastic.

My thoughts were captured by a comment made by one of the other students: what if the speaker is telling us a romanticized story about the mountain girl? This would add another level of processing to the fiction of the poem...but to which model can it be ascribed? I believe that the speaker, if separate from the poet, cannot romanticize his subject. Romantization, at least by my definition (confabulating perception with preexisting notions and biases about the subject), can only happen as an unconscious process, or else it would be a totally different (and less interesting) process. I would like to go into this difference in greater detail at some other time. For now, let's concentrate on how this model could change our understanding of the poem.

Thus, if we cannot apply my romanticization ideas to the [POET-->SPEAKER-->SUBJECT] model, let's try it with a simpler one, [POET/SPEAKER-->SUBJECT]. In this case we can ascribe the process of romantization to the SPEAKER because he is now one with the POET, a thinking being with the capacity for unconscious processes. Thus, we can update our model to, [POET/SPEAKER-->SUBJECT(perception)-->SUBJECT(reality)]. Using our model, we can interpret the poem in a very different way: Wordsworth himself, considering himself to be an impartial watcher/recorder instead perceives this mountain girl not as she actually is, but as he would like her to be, filling in those facts he doesn't know about her with schemata from his memory and from his expectations for simple mountain girls.

more on this later...